For the first time, police have compelled a suspect to unlock his phone using Face ID. The case reveals an interesting inversion : More advanced password technology is less protected from police seizure. In August, the 28-year-old Grant Michalski was implicated as part of a ring of men sharing images and videos of a young girl, the daughter of one of the ring’s members, being sexually abused. The FBI arrived at Michalski’s home with the authority to require him to unlock his iPhone X using (...)

It finally happened. The feds forced an Apple iPhone X owner to unlock their device with their face. A child abuse investigation unearthed by Forbes includes the first known case in which law enforcement used Apple Face ID facial recognition technology to open a suspect’s iPhone. That’s by any police agency anywhere in the world, not just in America. It happened on August 10, when the FBI searched the house of 28-year-old Grant Michalski, a Columbus, Ohio, resident who would later that (...)

Governments and corporations will soon know you better than you know yourself. Belief in the idea of ‘free will’ has become dangerous Should scholars serve the truth, even at the cost of social harmony ? Should you expose a fiction even if that fiction sustains the social order ? In writing my latest book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, I had to struggle with this dilemma with regard to liberalism. On the one hand, I believe that the liberal story is flawed, that it does not tell the (...)

Julie Henry was jogging when she got the call from the FBI. She didn’t recognize the number, which had a Washington state area code, but she answered anyway. The FBI agent identified herself as Kera O’Reilly, and said that Henry wasn’t in any trouble. O’Reilly was there to help. The phone call, which Henry received on February 22, 2018, brought her back to an internal conflict that she thought she’d finished wrestling with two years earlier. O’Reilly wanted to talk to Henry about her online (...)

In a landmark privacy decision, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Friday that police must get a warrant in order to obtain your cellphone’s location data over an extended period of time. The decision is a major victory for privacy advocates, who have long argued that the law has failed to keep pace with the amount of intrusive data we voluntarily hand over to private companies. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberal justices on the court, declaring that even though the data is held by (...)

Agency urges router owners to reset them and download updates amid fears hackers could collect data The FBI warned on Friday that Russian computer hackers had compromised hundreds of thousands of home and office routers and could collect user information or shut down network traffic. The US law enforcement agency urged the owners of many brands of routers to turn them off and on again and download updates from the manufacturer to protect themselves. The warning followed a court order (...)

The trauma of Sept. 11, 2001, gave rise to a dangerous myth that, to be safe, America had to give up basic rights and restructure its legal system. The United States was now in a perpetual state of war, the argument went, and the criminal approach to fighting terrorism — and the due process that goes along with it — wasn’t tough enough. President George W. Bush used this insidious formula to claim that his office had the inherent power to detain anyone he chose, for as long as he chose, (...)

Last November, reports that a pair of U.S. Border Patrol agents had been attacked with rocks at a desolate spot in West Texas made news around the country. The agents were found injured and unconscious at the bottom of a culvert off Interstate 10. Agent Rogelio Martinez soon died from his injuries. Early reports in right-wing media outlets such as Breitbart suggested that the perpetrators were undocumented immigrants, and President Donald Trump quickly embraced the narrative to bolster his (...)

Forget About Siri and Alexa — When It Comes to Voice Identification, the “NSA Reigns Supreme” At the height of the Cold War, during the winter of 1980, FBI agents recorded a phone call in which a man arranged a secret meeting with the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. On the day of his appointment, however, agents were unable to catch sight of the man entering the embassy. At the time, they had no way to put a name to the caller from just the sound of his voice, so the spy remained (...)

In a secret deal, a French company purchased code from a Kremlin-connected firm, incorporated it into its own software, and hid its existence from the FBI, according to documents and two whistleblowers. The allegations raise concerns that Russian hackers could compromise law enforcement computer systems. The fingerprint-analysis software used by the FBI and more than 18,000 other US law enforcement agencies contains code created by a Russian firm with close ties to the Kremlin, according (...)

Arguing over minute details of infantries, historically-accurate musket use, or what square footage was represented by a movement counter was not, apparently, a popular free-time pursuit for women of the 1970s. And several women who did play D&D in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s struggled against the very male-centric culture it had absorbed. Their work helped make D&D what it is.

In the July 1980 issue of Dragon magazine, TSR’s official D&D publication, Jean Wells and her colleague Kim Mohan penned the editorial, “Women Want Equality. And Why Not?” Women from across the country had written in about the “unfair and degrading treatment of women players,” who comprised, they wrote, about 10 percent of D&D’s fanbase. One reader recalled how her adventuring party forced her to seduce a small band of dwarves so her party could kill them. Another told of how her Dungeon Master made her Cleric fall from her god’s graces when she became pregnant.

You wouldn’t have noticed it unless you knew where — and how — to look, but the top-secret National Security Agency document leaked to the Intercept and published Monday contained a clue that may have led authorities to its source. Spread throughout the pages were barely visible yellow dots, each less than a millimeter in diameter, repeated over and over in the same rectangular pattern. You could see them by zooming in on the pages and adjusting the color. Or, if you had the original printed (...)

About how signals intelligence agencies, like NSA and GCHQ, are intercepting communications, we learned a lot from the Snowden revelations and the German parliamentary inquiry, but also from new legislation in France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Much less is known about the practice of tapping by law enforcement, like for example the FBI and police forces. Now, a case from the Netherlands provides some interesting insights in how Dutch police intercepts internet communications (...)